If you choose to enter a state of worship, the first thing you may encounter is an unworthiness or a reluctance to receive love. This is natural. When you acknowledge your own divinity and the indissoluble connection of your divinity with the Source of All, something is going to scream. What screams is every part of you that has hidden for shame. Worship brings these parts blinking into the light and expecting punishment.

There is no punishment. You are innocent in the eyes of God, whatever you have done or not done. A jewel is no less a jewel for having picked up some mud on its travels. But for you, to know that you are innocent is a skill. This skill can be acquired through worship.

When you meet the light of the Source it is everywhere. There is no place it cannot be. Whatever within you that declares itself to be a sin or a fault resists its own dissolution. It cannot believe that it could cease to exist. So much has depended on your belief in evil. You have needed a shadow to believe in your own existence. But you are not the mud on the jewel and you are not the shadow at your feet.

Let the light dissolve the shadow. Let love wash away the mud. The shadow is not evil, the mud is not dirty. You have rested in the shade. Out of mud the lotus grows. You cannot live on Earth in human form without mud and shadow, but they are not you. Let them be your dear friends, the companions of your journey, the richness of your experience. Then you begin to see them as the Source sees them.

Every experience you have ever had is created out of light. You have chosen to focus upon particular aspects of the light so that it might crystallise into the world of form, where it becomes your particular experience. But that light out of which the experience is made retains its capacity to manifest in an infinite variety of possible ways and you retain the capacity to refocus and allow the light to express itself anew.

In the state of consciousness we call worship you allow or begin to allow the fixed forms of experience and identity to dissolve into pure beingness. Shadow becomes light, mud becomes lotus; all is beauty. You still shape light, you still express it into the world, what you manifest still casts a shadow, is still made of the Earth, but now you grant the light freedom to create the highest form it can for you. When you witness its beauty you liberate the light. You grant your divine self permission to be the creator in your life.

Innocence can be found again, for it is never truly lost. Love restores innocence. When you let in the infinite love of the Source it reveals your innocence to you. You start from innocence and end in innocence. Everything else is a diversion. Worship reveals that you never left the place from which you started.